Finding a Way
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” Warren Buffet
You don’t typically associate the word, risk with the business of writing. You might imagine that writers work on their own in quiet comfort. Here’s the reality.
I stare at a blank page every single day with no guarantee I’ll produce a single word. Sure I have ideas. Many. I ponder what my characters want and need. I have notions of the trouble they will get into. But figuring out the truth of their stories and why it matters is toil of patience, resilience and one heck of a lot of risk. And in the end, who knows if anyone will read what I’ve written.
In my work I’m trying to reveal something about life, something I’m trying to understand and shed light on. I do this through my characters, but I realize that whatever I write also reveals who I am, what I think, and worry about. As a writer, I’m completely exposed, an open book, as it were and that is frightening business.
Yes, I write fiction. But is there ever any true fiction? Now there’s a question. I’ll have to ponder that one some more.
In the meantime, several of the guest authors to this year’s Whistler Writers Festival jumped at the opportunity to write about the festival’s theme. Risk.
I’m so pleased that so many resonated with this theme. The first blog is from author Terry Watada about the risk about being a Japanese Canadian and the second is from poet and memoirist Yvonne Blomer who writes about her memoir about cycling in Asia.
We’ll have more blogs from our risk-taking guest authors in the weeks ahead on our whistler writers fest website so check us out. And better yet, come and meet these special folks, October 12th to 15th in Whistler.
For now I’m going to return to my own novel in progress and again dive in, hoping against hope, to find the story I’m supposed to tell. But in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quote from English poet and scholar, Sir Philip Sydney, “Either I will find a way or make one.” That is, in a nutshell, the writer’s job.
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